Year 4, Month 11, Day 13: I Saw Mommy Kissing Elvis!

Sigh. Another day, another zombie lie. George Pieler, in Forbes, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune:

The Los Angeles Times is taking heat for announcing it will not publish any letters rejecting the hypothesis that humans are causing global warming. At least, that seems to be what the Times is doing: in an artful yet awkwardly made announcement (later defended in a pointed Op Ed), editor Paul Thornton stated that letters asserting “that there are no signs humans have caused climate change” do not get printed in the LA Times. The reason? According to Mr. Thornton, it’s because the Times traffics only in facts, and the quoted assertion is unquestionably non-factual by the paper’s standards. Those include consulting only “scientists with advanced degrees who undertake tedious research” and who, as per the UN’s climate change panel (IPCC)), say humans do cause climate change.

Jargon matters here, because the advocates of what we now call anthropomorphic climate change as the explanation for such general warming has been observed in, at least, the past 40 years, used to say ‘global warming’ not ‘climate change.’ As warming trends have failed to form to those ‘tedious researcher’ climate prediction models, the focus on warming as such has yielded to the much handier and conveniently meaningless phrase, ‘climate change.’

The Trib has never printed one of my letters. I wonder why? November 3:

In attacking the LA Times’ recent decision to exclude letters from climate change denialists, George Pieler perpetuates the conservative shibboleth that environmentalists popularized the phrase “climate change” as a way of changing the subject when “global warming” failed to materialize.

Mr. Pieler’s wrong three times. First is the simple fact that all measurements confirm that Earth’s temperature is rising dramatically. Next: the inconvenient fact that scientists (not the popular press and news media) have always called it “climate change,” because the phrase is more accurate. And last but not least is the simple truth that the phrase “climate change” was promoted to the news media by the Bush administration on the advice of Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who felt that “global warming” was too “scary.”

The Times’ decision is as sensible as rejecting submissions from hollow-Earth advocates, lizard-people conspiracy theorists, or those who reject the germ theory of disease.

Warren Senders